If you try it, post any interesting results in the comments!
Tags: Internet

Comments

OK my, I so have to try this. Hell, I study network theory, so if anybody has to try this, I do.

By the way, I feel the need to comment on the xkcd comic below the one that inspired you.

It discusses cos(symbol for heart).

I'd like to generalize that to cn(symbol for heart), where 'cn' refers to the elliptic function whose limit as the elliptic modulus goes to zero is the cosine. (And this comment isn't totally out of the blue, as Lemming may recognize if he recalls a certain conversation.)

FWIW, I have a special fondness for elliptic functions. Some people love icosohedrons; others love SQUIDs; I love elliptic functions (...among other mathematical phenomena)

That xkcd comic reminded me of a linguistic need that I've noted before - what do we call that "three hours of fascinated clicking" which makes Wikipedia so dangerous? That's a definition in need of a word, but I haven't come up with anything myself.

A winning strategy seems to be getting to as general/large an article as possible in as few clicks. I kind of lucked out with "Canada" being one of the two links from the starting article. There might be a shorter route using India connection.

Jumping to high level articles quickly makes this a bit too easy... I just did a check of the xkcd example. There is indeed an article on wet t-shirt contests (which raises the question why, considering how restrictive they are on, for example, what scientists are important enough to "deserve" wikipedia articles...). N=4 gets to Taft, thanks entirely to a link to "1998" in the wet t-shirt entry. 1998, 20th Century, 1910s, Taft. Disappointing! Starting from Taft would almost certainly have been more interesting, but I honestly didn't think there'd be a wet t-shirt article!

Of course technically everything is N=1 to anything else, in the sense that by the nature of wikipedia you can just create articles and/or links at whim. You'll get reverted within minutes and banned within days if you keep it up, but it is technically a solution... :-D

I realize I put this definition on my blog and not Justin's but in case anybody is cross-reading, his N is number of hops and mine was number of pages.

Also, to make the game fair, clearly it has t be with pre-existing links.

Re: flicking: You're correct that this is a more specific type of it. I'd suggesting wikiflicking but that has too many syllables. You could just say surfing wiki, which (granted) has the same number of syllables but it doesn't tie my tongue up so badly.

Sounds like "web that smut", an old game from the mid-90s. The idea then was to see how many links it took to get from any non-porn site to any porn site. I think it was three links from Bob Dole's campaign site.

Via Chad's comments on the same topic, see this page. Includes a link to a pathfinding tool.

Wikisurfing should work. Technically it's the "pedia" part that's the time-sink (for most people - obviously some folks like the wiki-ness), but I certainly couldn't come up with a word based on that part of "wikipedia".

I nearly shat myself when I saw Laplace Expansion, but it wasn't nearly so bad as expected! I also managed to avoid high-level articles / categories -- I was tempted to try and find a route through one of the umbrella mathematical categories pages, but that likely wouldn't have saved me much anyway.

The high-level articles strategy (i.e., get to one of those asap) is the one that basically corresponds to suggested strategies on network navigation algorithms for things like P2P (I think there's a paper by Adamic and Huberman on this) and for vaccination strategies on disease dynamics models on networks (with the networks estimated from real data as opposed to grown artificially).

So I am a little late on this, but... I went from The Dixie Chicks to The Red Army Faction (West Germany's Anti Terrorist group)
1. The Dixie Chicks
2. President of the United States (not to be confused with the similarly named band)
3. Cold War
4. Western Europe
5. West Germany (the Federal Republic of Germany)
6. Red Army Faction (or the Baader-Meinhof Gang)